Kuzano

Sarge is onto a good tip, and in 25 years of working on computers, the freeze trick has worked for me. Also, if this drive was in a computer that sat in one orientation for the duration of it's operating life, when you try to restart after the freeze trick, try to set it up in the position it always worked in.

haze63 Loc: Tiffin Ohio

YOUTUBE it dead hard drive I fixed them myself

haze63 Loc: Tiffin Ohio

and always MAKE BACK UPS

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

Thanks for this bit of help. I think I shall give it a try. Knowing what I know about electronics this is probably a real good fix.

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

Good luck. I have 2 Seagate drives that quit on me. the you tube video listed below is a good start point but getting the cover apart is the tricky part. I used to trust Seagate but over the years Seagate wont even give you an address to get help from. especially if you forgot to register the product. I know I have tried to find one. I figured a letter of complaint and a drive showing up at their door might get some results but they give you no address to do that with. I just don't buy Seagate anymore but I will try the trick listed here.

Vince68 Loc: Wappingers Falls, NY

I had a internal WD HD die on me which had mostly files on it, but no photos. In my case, it was the board that fried due to a power supply problem I had, which also took out my cd/dvd drive as well. I found a Canadian company that repairs the circuit board of hard drives that fail for a very, very reasonable price of $49.99. It took about a month or so for total turnaround time, mainly due to international shipping regulations, customs. Repair time was about 1 day as I recall from the emails back and forth once they received it. Their website is http://www.onepcbsolution.com/ The person I dealt with via email was Kevin and you can email him at support@pcbsolution.com I don't know how involved it is taking apart an external drive. With my internal drive, all I needed was a torx driver to remove the board from the HD and then send it to them for repair. Worked fine after that.

Good luck.

CPR Loc: Nature Coast of Florida

Had the same problem. The tech at the store opened the case - took out the drive and plugged it into a small box he had on hand and voila - all fixed. He told me the controller is the electronics but the drive is a separate free standing unit. That was a few years back and it still works great.

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

As for getting the cover off of an external drive to reveal the drive inside. It is a bit tricky. There are small plastic catches all around the case but first you must find the seam around the device and the gently slip something thin into this seam. I warn you can slice a finger if you use an Xacto knife like I did. I used a dull bladed Xacto. Slip I Between the two side of the case and gently ease the catches apart. I use a guitar pic as a hold open device once the case starts to open because the case has a tendency to want to stay closed. You just go all of the way around the case until all catches are released. I have also use the tip of a dull letter opener instead of the xacto blade. The edge of the blade is just to coax the seam to open when you can hardly see the seam. Like I said a little tricky and fingers can be shredded if you are not extremely careful. it will open it just takes time and care. I just opened two drives and plan to pick up the sata adapter late this week or next when payroll shows up. Both of the drives I have used to work. One just quit when I delivered my work (which I always have a copy of) to the studio. The computer just would not see it. The other one keeps wanting me to reformat it and won't reformat but will come up as a drive on the computer. I figure if this works I might just have 2 more drives if I get a docking bay for them. Inside the cases I found drives that look identical to laptop drives. They have a foil RF covering over them which you want to keep intact but it will easily pull back out of the way to get to the board that a you tube video from a previous answer talks about. And I though it would be bare circuits inside. One of the drives is a Samsung inside the Seagate case. The address it has on it is in the Netherlands and both are assembled in China.

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

Drives can fail in a number of ways. The drive motor can die - open the case and see if you tell the disk is whirring or not - sometimes a finger works to tell. The reading head might be hung up in some wat - try twisting and turning upside down in a few directions, the head might just move enough to unjam. Be careful with this maneuver, tho. An acquaintance would tap with a hamner a bit - this would be dead last resort. Some element of the circuity might have failed - find a same make & model of case and put the drive part in the new case - of course, thats money for what might not work. How valuable are the files?

totemjoe

I have a dead Western Digital and Western wanted $1,400.00 to "try" and retrieve my pics. $600.00 looks to be a pretty good deal.

DvlDawg Loc: Pensacola, FL

Does it sound like the hdd is spinning up?

DvlDawg Loc: Pensacola, FL

I'm sorry I cut myself off short. If it does, I can typically recover via software, without a clean room teardown.

cambriaman Loc: Central CA Coast

I had a similar problem. Fortunately, the external drive power supply was the culprit and the tech was able to mount the drive itself to an external (to the drive) power source, boot up the drive and upload the data to a new external drive. Lucky!

blackest Loc: Ireland

That would give bad sectors but not stop it reading. Usually the heads fail to retract and because that gap is tiny it is like an interference fit and the drive motor doesn't have enough torque to spin the disks with the heads parked on them. I did a drive like that recently and in the end i just opened it up parked the heads and closed it up. Drive spins up and then spent 2 hours pulling the data off before it crashed for good.

There are 2 problems with opening it up debris from the head crash and dust from not being in a clean room. for the distances between the heads and the disks dust particles may as well be boulders.

I reckon i managed to recover 90-95% of the data on that drive.

The freezer trick can release stuck drives sometimes but if the disks are spinning up then it is pointless trying it.

lsusb is a useful linux command you can get it through brew for osx it lists whats on the usb bus. There will be a few things on a mac like bluetooth and webcam but there should be a hard drive controller if the drive is plugged in even if the drive part was dead it would report the controller if the controller isn't being reported then it is likely the usb sata bridge board that has died.

Of course it may be a dead usb port but if you can get something else recognised on it then it isn't that.

Bob Boner

When this happened to me, I took the drive to the tech guy at the college where I worked, and he was able to recover the files. If you know somebody who works at a college, you might try that.